My theory: I would almost bet that in the entire history of deepbit it has never gone over 24 hours without getting at least one block. When it went 24 hours without a block for the first time this uncovered a bug in the web site code.

Am I right?

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Wouldn't Dynamic or User Defined Difficulty be more important than Stratum for ASIC mining? Or is it easier to implement both at the same time?

Even with higher share difficulty ASIC miners will still have to request new work frequently. This problem can be solved by either ntime rolling or stratum-compatible protocol. First solution is, of course, much simpler, but people will seek for "stratum" pools because they think that those are "asic-ready".